Ateon
While building Vulcard for the Game Programming Lab at ETH Zurich, we accumulated dozens of individual sprite PNGs for icons and UI elements. Loading each as a separate texture works fine early on. It’s not how you want to ship, though. Every SpriteBatch.Draw call that switches textures flushes the GPU batch, and 60 sprites can easily mean 60 separate draw calls per frame. The fix is a…
When a satellite sends telemetry data to a ground station, both sides need to agree on exactly how that data is structured in binary. The same goes for network protocols, aircraft systems, and anything else where machines exchange precisely formatted messages. Get the encoding wrong and you get garbage. Get the decoding wrong and you may silently recover incorrect data. Why Does ASN.1 Need Formal…
While developing Vulcard for this year’s iteration of the Game Programming Lab at ETH Zurich, we wanted to integrate the Steam API and package the game for multiple platforms. This process came with a few unexpected hurdles. In this post, I’ll walk through the complete solution we ended up using. If you’re looking to publish a MonoGame project on Steam, this might save you some…
Like Polymer before, Lit-Element uses javascript or typescript files for code, templates and styles by default, to enable the use of javascript variables. While this may be useful in some cases, personally I prefer having my style definitions in separate files mainly to benefit from Sass , but also the added benefit of editor assistance like highlighting and autocompletion. Fortunately this can be…
Imagine you are playing a game of TicTacToe against your friend. Obviously you want to find an ideal strategy to increase your chances of winning. How can you determine your next move? Introduction Let us start by labeling the fields of our grid. Each game is then a series of numbers chosen alternately by you and your opponent. Instead of writing a list of all possible games that could be played,…
As those following the news about the Polyring may have read on xyquadrat , our widget can now be styled with themes. For those interested about the inner workings I will provide some technical information here. The component makes heavy use of css variables alongside the attribute theme , which can be set on the component. Let’s walk through the needed setup, which consists of both…
There are multiple ways to send a secret message. The best known and usually used, especially over the internet, is by encrypting the message and later decrypting it. But it’s not the only possibilty. Steganography is the process of hiding information within another carrier medium, fooling everyone else into thinking that the carrier is the only message. The basic principle ist simple: Add a…